My wife and I are spending three weeks in Japan for my sabbatical. Alongside our first grand sumo tournament, the other live event we really wanted to see was a baseball game. We caught one on our second day in Osaka, and it turned into one of the best nights of the trip.
Why the Hanshin Tigers
Kristine grew up in Detroit and is a Tigers fan. I'm a Phillies fan myself. Either way, a Hanshin Tigers game was an easy sell — and the connection between the Hanshin and Detroit clubs turns out to be more than a coincidence.
When the Hanshin franchise was preparing for its inaugural season in 1936, the name "Tigers" was chosen through a public naming contest. The organizers picked it specifically to echo the American Detroit Tigers — both teams came from regions built on heavy industry. So Kristine's childhood team and the team we came to see share a name on purpose.
Getting the tickets
We found tickets on viagogo for the game on May 20th. They shipped to our hotel and were waiting in our room when we checked in, which felt almost too easy.
The one piece of advice I'd read beforehand was to sit in the right-field cheering section, because that's the only place to actually experience a Japanese game. That turned out to be exactly right.
Getting to the stadium was just as easy. From Osaka-Umeda station it's a short ride on the Hanshin line — 15 minutes at most — and we walked out of the train surrounded by fans in Tigers gear.
Koshien is the Wrigley Field of Japan
Koshien Stadium has the same reputation Wrigley does back home — the old ballpark everyone reveres. The giveaway is the ivy growing up the outside of the building.
The forecast was rain, and we came prepared with ponchos, but we only got a few light showers. Good luck for an outdoor game.
One bit of fan gear I loved: small cap ornaments of the team mascot holding a flag. People clip them onto their hats to make them a little more fun. We need these in the States.
What Japanese baseball gets right
A few things stood out, and most of them have nothing to do with the box score.
The cheering is the big one. Every player has his own chant, and the right-field section runs them on cue — trumpets, drums, and a level of coordinated energy you just don't get at an American game. By the end of the night we knew most of the chants ourselves.
It works because someone is running the whole thing. There's effectively a drum major out front directing the musicians and the crowd, and the trumpet players carry the melody for every chant. It also helped that we were sitting next to and in front of a few die-hard fans screaming the chants directly into our ears — there's no faster way to learn them.
The game itself has some real differences from MLB too:
- No pitch clock. The pitcher controls the pace entirely, which gives the game a different rhythm.
- A smaller, tackier ball. It's easier to grip and spin, so pitchers get more movement.
- A four-player limit on foreign-born players per active roster. I like the constraint — it keeps the league's identity intact.
- The pitcher bats. There's no designated hitter in the Central League, and we got the perfect demonstration: the opposing pitcher hit the first home run of his career while we watched.
Uriko: the beer vendors
The other thing you notice fast is the beer girls. They're called uriko (売り子) — mobile draft vendors who walk the stands with kegs strapped to their backs.
You have to give them massive props. They're hauling full kegs, or cases of beer, up and down the stadium steps all game long. They wear knee pads for a reason — I saw one of them fall, and the pads turned it into a soft landing.
They were selling both Kirin and Asahi beer, plus highballs poured right in front of you, plus Asahi's GINON Lemon — our pick. It's a sugar-free gin lemon sour made by soaking citrus peels in the spirit before distillation. It has a crisp, real lemon taste, and it was very good.
The food
Hanshin fans are known for their beef curry. It's a long-running stadium tradition, and they sell it both at the team store and on Amazon, so it must hold up. We didn't actually get any — but it's apparently the move.
Otherwise the menu is a mix: all the Japanese staples — ramen, karaage, gyoza — alongside American ballpark food like fries, hot dogs on a stick, and popcorn.
The 7th-inning balloons
The 7th-inning stretch at a Tigers game means balloons. Everyone inflates a yellow balloon and launches it at once. I'd bought us a couple ahead of time, along with the little pump you use to fill them.
When they all go up together it's genuinely something to see.
A gift from the couple behind us
I'd read that it's a tradition for fans to share food at the game, and we got to experience it firsthand. The older couple seated behind us handed us a "pole weiner" — a small hot dog wrapped in plastic — and a Miyako Konbu, a vinegared kelp snack, as a kind of peace offering. We thought that was such a generous, specific gesture.
The actual game: down 7-0, then a walk-off
This happened to be one of the most exciting games I've ever been to.
The Tigers fell behind 7-0. The pitching was rough early, and the Chunichi Dragons were feeling themselves. Then the game flipped: a four-run 7th inning, three more in the 8th. Here's the game-tying hit.
And then, in the bottom of the 9th, Shota Morishita hit a walk-off home run to win it. The whole stadium came apart. There's video of it on Reddit if you want to see the moment.
We're Japanese baseball fans now
We loved it, full stop. We walked out considering ourselves real Japanese baseball fans, and I half-seriously told Kristine we should find a US cable package that carries NPB.
One last detail: as we got back on the train after the game, a group of Japanese men asked where we were from. When I said Chicago, they immediately lit up — "Seiya! Seiya!" — for Seiya Suzuki, the Cubs outfielder. Baseball is hard to escape here. The Japanese sports channels broadcast West Coast MLB games late at night, especially the Dodgers, so the sport is just always on, in both directions.